sylver_dragon

I took up indoor rock climbing a couple years ago, partly because I have a similarly sedentary job and hate most forms of exercise. I can certainly understand the draw. I go 2-3 times a week and have stuck with it for so long because it forces me to get out of my head, but also doesn't require dealing with strangers as much. It's just a clam, focused activity which also happens to work my body.

Unfortunately, as a hobby, rock climbing is going to work your hands and arms. I would say that, as I have gotten better, I do a better job of using body position to prevent having to hang by my hands. But, just the other day, my foot slipped and I was hanging on by my fingertips for a couple seconds. And harder climbs may require you to engage your hands more. Though again, body position and technique counts for a lot.

Best advice I can give is: talk to your doctor. They will know more about how your condition will be affected by climbing and what your options are. Certainly more than random idiots on the other side of the internet.

Game: Quest for Glory I: So you want to be a Hero
Book: Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
TV Show: Babylon 5
Movie: Spaceballs

All fairly old, but still some of all time favorites.

Honor is a social construct which is used to promote "pro-social" behavior. It can be useful in the absence of or in concert with other systems of social control (e.g. laws, religion). Of course, "pro-social" is very much a construct of what the creating society considers to be positive. This can include acting in ways which we, in our current social constructs, would consider "anti-social". Honor ends up getting idolized in media because it often includes an element of self-discipline and self-sacrifice and is usually associated with warrior cultures. Though, it also tends to be conservative and resist changing as social mores change. This has led to some famous consequences as honor based systems tried to cling to social constructs which were no longer tenable. For example, the Satsuma Rebellion saw the existing feudal class seek to maintain it's grip on power in then face of a changing society.

Ultimately, any system of honor would need to be taught to new adherents. It's no different from a religion or legal system in that regard. No one comes out of the womb fully indoctrinated to a system of honor. So no, it isn't really self-explanatory. Like any social construct, you would need to define the system and how it interacts with the society in which is was created. Otherwise, it's just naming a system for social control and hoping no one notices that it's a hollow shell.

The Holocaust was unique in the industrialization of genocide. The Nazi party organized the state around the process, using industrial technology to track, move and kill millions of people in an efficient manner. It was also very well documented and was publicized in a way, which made people really aware of what was occurring. As horrible as genocide is, at any scale, most are fairly limited in geography and organization. The Nazis showed us just how bad things can be, if we bend the resources of a modern, industrial state, to those ends. So, I'd tend to disagree with Walz's thesis that the Holocaust wasn't unique. Though, I would still agree that it should be taught in context with other genocides which have happened and which are happening today. It can become an example of just how bad a genocide can become. But, the goal should be to teach students about the causes, and processes of genocides. So that, we hopefully will try to stop them from occurring.

That said, that the modern Israeli State uses the horrible things, which happened to Jews in the early 20th century, to justify doing similarly horrible things to Palestinians today, is downright atrocious. It cheapens the horrors faced by Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

Have you considered just beige boxing a server yourself? My home server is a mini-ITX board from Asus running a Core i5, 32GB of RAM and a stack of SATA HDDs all stuffed in a smaller case. Nothing fancy, just hardware picked to fulfill my needs.

Limiting yourself to bespoke systems means limiting yourself to what someone else wanted to build. The main downside to building it yourself is ensuring hardware comparability with the OS/software you want to run. If you are willing to take that on, you can tailor your server to just what you want.

This would go one of two ways:

1. States would take the money, and money being fungible, State budgets for payroll would ultimately go down by that same X. Teacher pay might get a short term bump, but the long term result would just be States relying on the subsidy and using the extra budget room to do other stuff, without meaningful long term changes to teacher pay.
2. The money comes with regulations around teacher pay (to prevent the issue above) and many States refuse to take the money to avoid the regulations. The whole thing becomes a political football and nothing really changes.

Ultimately, the US is a Federal system which means a lot of stuff is handled at the State and Local level. A wholesale takeover of those responsibilities by the Federal Government is not as simple as "hand money to the States". Decentralized authority has long been both a feature and a bug in the US system, but it's not one which is likely to be changed anytime soon. The upshot of this decentralization is that States can use their authority to push and demonstrate policies before there is a national consensus on those policies. The downside is that some policies need to be fought on a State by State basis, which is a lot harder than a top-down, command style government.

The two issues have little to do with each other. Teacher pay is handled at local and State levels. US Foreign Aid is a Federal issue.

Once again, the format doesn’t work for me when the main topic is about a fad that nobody talks about anymore.

Ya, this is was a clear problem with the episode. Sure, all the NFT jokes were on point; but, given how much the issue has faded, it felt stale. I enjoyed the Bender story. But, I suspect this was a bit of grasping at straws. The best Futurama has been when the show focused on the characters. But, with a lot of the main stories about the characters wrapped up in previous seasons, there isn't a lot for the writers to explore. So, we get a Bender backstory which was ok, I guess.

I'm still looking forward to the rest of the season. But, I can see the room for criticism.

Humans are pretty terrible and we'll find any excuse to justify our terribleness. One of the parts of the French Revolution was the Dechristianization of France. While this may sound like a good thing, which should lead people to live their lives based on reason, it also led to violence against priests. And the lack of religion did nothing to stop the Reign of Terror. In short, it was less an atheist utopia and more just humans finding different excuses to be terrible to one an other.

Similarly, the Soviet Union was founded on the Marxist principal that "religion is the opiate of the masses". This meant that the Soviet Union was officially athiest. However, unlike some of the French Revolutionary governments, the USSR largely tolerated religious practices. At the same time, the officially a theist state got up to a lot of horrible stuff.

At the same time, there is an argument to be made that Christianity helped reign in some of the worst excesses of monarchs during the Middle Ages. It's important to remember that people really believed this stuff. Kings really did think about their immortal soul and what they would be forced to answer for on "judgement day". Fear is a powerful motivator and it may be that, for all their terrible selfishness, some monarchs may have been led to moderate the worst of it based on that fear.

All that said, I'm not sure how much differently history would have played out, without religion. As I led with, humans are pretty terrible. Many wars may have had a religious veneer, to get the people to go along with them, but they were more often about power, control and ego than religious conviction. Religion provides a convenient excuse to define "the other". The othering of people creates a permission structure where we will not only tolerate, but often gleefully engage in, truly horrible acts against "the other". And it doesn't require religion to do it. Take a look around the Lemmyverse and you'll find videos of Russian soldiers being blown apart by drone dropped munitions. And the comment sections will be talking about how "they deserve it" or making jokes and light of another human being ripped apart. And these comments will be defended because of the horrible actions of the Russian Government and some Russian soldiers. Russian soldiers have been placed firmly in "the other" and so we can celebrate their horrible deaths, and be cheered on for it in many corners of Lemmy. No religion required.

So ya. I'm not a fan of religion, nor am I religious myself. But, I have no illusions that religion has a lock on people being terrible to each other. It has absolutely been involved in making it happen throughout history. But, I am skeptical of the idea that history without it wouldn't have been just as filled with humans doing terrible things to each other. Human nature tends towards tribalism and the creation of "in groups" and "out groups". With those in the former more than willing to do anything and everything to the latter.

It's getting Fark'd

So how about hacking CrowdStrike and obtaining that access? I’m guessing it might be easier than hacking Microsoft?

Maybe. CrowdStrike is a company which specializes in security and has some pretty smart folks in that area. They also live and die by the perceived value of their security products. So, security is pretty important to the company. Microsoft is a conglomerate, and while it does have some arms which specialize in (and are pretty good at) security, the company's continued existence doesn't depend on their performance. So, the Microsoft President can go in front of Congress and promise to do better, and we all know this is bullshit and Microsoft will continue to be Microsoft.

As for an attacker actually leveraging the CrowdStrike platform as part of an attack. It's entirely possible. Security products have been found to have vulnerabilities in the past. IIRC, McAfee's ePO server was vulnerable to Log4j. And given CrowdStrike's engine runs in Ring 0 on the endpoints, it's certainly an attractive target. Finding a Remote Code exploit in it seems like something an APT like the NSA or PLA Unit 61398 might get up to. That said, as I mentioned above, CrowdStike also employs a lot of smart folks and is likely doing it's level best to find those vulnerabilities first and fix them.

Are there other companies having the same access level as CrowdStrike? How vulnerable are they?

Ya. Really, any EDR or A/V product is going to run in Ring 0. And any such kernel level driver crashing is going to cause a BSOD. That's just the way Windows is designed. I have personally dealt with bad updates from several other products causing BSODs. Including one which brought down the entire site I was working at, at the time. I believe it also took down a number of other sites as well. Since, once I figure out how to get the bad update out of our system, the folks responsible for the update actually reached out and asked me what I did.

Ultimately, products like these exist in a very trusted state on systems, because they have to. if and when they crash, you can expect a BSOD. In this case, I suspect CrowdStrike is going to receive (and they deserve) a lot of shit for the way this one went down. The reporting I've seen states that the update file was just a mass of null bytes. And it seems there was no sanity checking or error handling for a corrupt update being pushed by CrowdStrike. I suspect that's gonna get fixed pretty quick, but it was a pretty bad oversight for a product with regular, live updates.

Short answer: yes, you can self-host on any computer connected to your network.

Longer answer:
You can, but this is probably not the best way to go about things. The first thing to consider is what you are actually hosting. If you are talking about a website, this means that you are running some sort of web server software 24x7 on your main PC. This will be eating up resources (CPU cycles, RAM) which you may want to dedicated to other processes (e.g. gaming). Also, anything you do on that PC may have a negative impact on the server software you are hosting. Reboot and your server software is now offline. Install something new and you might have a conflict bringing your server software down. Lastly, if your website ever gets hacked, then your main PC also just got hacked, and your life may really suck. This is why you often see things like Raspberry Pis being used for self-hosting. It moves the server software on to separate hardware which can be updated/maintained outside a PC which is used for other purposes. And it gives any attacker on that box one more step to cross before owning your main PC. Granted, it's a small step, but the goal there is to slow them down as much as possible.

That said, the process is generally straight forward. Though, there will be some variations depending on what you are hosting (e.g. webserver, nextcloud, plex, etc.) And, your ISP can throw a massive monkey wrench in the whole thing, if they use CG-NAT. I would also warn you that, once you have a presence on the internet, you will need to consider the security implications to whatever it is you are hosting. With the most important security recommendation being "install your updates". And not just OS updates, but keeping all software up to date. And, if you host WordPress, you need to stay on top of plugin and theme updates as well. In short, if it's running on your system, it needs to stay up to date.

The process generally looks something like:

• Install your updates.
• Install the server software.
• Apply updates to the software (the installer may be an outdated version).
• Apply security hardening based on guides from the software vendor.
• Configure your firewall to forward the required ports (and only the required ports) from the WAN side to the server.
• Figure out your external IP address.
• Try accessing the service from the outside.

Optionally, you may want to consider using a Dynamic DNS service (DDNS) (e.g. noip.com) to make reaching your server easier. But, this is technically optional, if you're willing to just use an IP address and manually update things on the fly.

Good luck, and in case I didn't mention it, install your updates.